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Does early attendance to center-based childcare alter children’s intestinal microbiota?

Henrik Eckermann, Gerben Hermes and Carolina de Weerth  
@Henne412   henrikeckermann87@gmail.com   github.com/HenrikEckermann

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Introduction

Research Question

  • Does attendance to center-based childcare alter gut microbiota composition?

Motivation

  • Gut microbial composition plays an important role in physical and mental health.

  • Animal studies suggest:
    • a sensitive period in early life with regard to the influence of microbes on the host.
    • that early life stress disrupts the gut microbial ecosystem with negative health consequences.
  • Entering center based childcare can be considered an early life stressor in humans that leads to prolonged increases in cortisol levels as compared to caring in the home environment.

Contribution

  • To investigate whether childcare attendance is a disruptive factor for the developing microbiota.

Alpha diversity, Beta diversity and relative abundances between groups and time points PRE/POST

Data and Methods

Research Design

  • Longitudinal study (BIBO Study)
  • Microbiota sampling at 10 and 14 weeks of age
  • Two groups: Chilcare attendance (n = 49) vs control (n = 49)

Data

  • Microbial determination of three phylogenetic levels with the Human Intestinal Tract Chip (HITChip)
  • Covariates: Amount of breastfeeding (number of feedings/day) and age
  • Data was treated as compositional (centered-log-ratio-transformation)

Statistical Analyses:

  • PCA (Aitchison distance)
  • PERMANOVA (Aitchison distance)
  • Hierarchical Linear Mixed Models (Gaussian family)
  • Bayesian Hierarchical Generalized Linear Models (Generalized normal distribution)
  • Randfom Forest Classification